Matilde Cordeiro

Matilde is a legume ecological geneticist, from Cascais, near Lisboa, Portugal. Her agronomy training has been useful to everyone in the house, because it incorporated a lot of wine tasting. She pretty much specialises in wine from Europe and California, and most anywhere else — and has an encyclopedic knowledge of Port wines, amarguinha, and firewater. When she returns from trips to Portugal, her bags tend to be filled to bursting with bottles of Portuguese liqueur, sausage, and cheese.

Matilde tends to cook anything you might want to call Andalusian, from all over Spain and Portugal. Sausage, soups, rices, stews, and desserts. Her favourite of all, however, is seafood, and she’ll wax rhapsodic about the pleasures of cuttlefish ink, shrimp heads, barnacles, and salt cod for hours on end.

No — literally, hours. She’s even prone to get lost while driving, because she starts talking about bloody fish, and forgets where she’s going. But other than that, she’s a great contributor to the cooking, eating, and fun of the Normandie kitchen.